Just a quick blog post about the label roll, mentioned previously. Like Post-Its the label roll is very easy to remove, but sticks well, because the whole back is ‘glued’. I’m using it to label all sort of items, but have now started using it to label Field Notes. I think it’s another great purpose for it.
I only have three types of Field Notes, but out of those three two, the County Fair edition and the Cherry Wood edition, are difficult to label, so the label roll comes in quite handy.
3M Label Roll, Field Notes and Rustico
Other notebooks are often easier to label. For Banditapple carnets I use a white pencil [1]The stamp was done using my block printing kit..
Because of Kent from Pencilog I got to know Arnie, the guy behind Banditapple, and because of Arnie I got to know Eun Suk Bang, the designer behind ToBe Story.
I really love the Banditapple carnets, I must have used them for more than five years now (just because my first review of them was a bit more than five years ago) and together with Atoma they are definitely one of my two favourite notebooks. Banditapple has the better paper, Atoma is more practical in terms of reorganising/reshuffling things around within the notebook.
My recent Lamy Line Friends and Banditapple carnet order also included two items from Eun Suk. One of them was the “wooden board”, being described as a little table to write on. The idea came from the fact the carnets are made from a tree, as should the surface be you put them on.
The wooden board is not only designed by her, she is also making them herself. Each board takes three to five days to manufacture, which involves cutting beech plywood with a CNC machine as well as applying three oil coatings before they get to dry.
They were sold in May this year as the Banditapple carnet x ToBe: wooden board. The price was $15. It was one of a number of side projects Banditapple was taking part in, all with low numbers of items being handmade and all of the items sold out very fast. There’s a good chance the wooden board will be available again if there is enough demand.
If have used the board many times when I needed a surface to write on and when the board was nearby. It was always very hand. There are three strings, so you can attach three notebooks if you want, but I usually just used it as a surface to write on.
Despite my admiration for the simple beauty of this board I have to say that there are also drawbacks, mainly that I haven’t figured out whether there’s an easy way of writing on the left pages of your notebooks if you use the wooden board as a clipboard and that the wooden board is only useful is you have it with you, but for practical reasons you usually wouldn’t have the board with you when you need it, unless you use it as a stationary notebook holder / organiser. In any case, it is a beautiful board!
Just a reminder, since I changed the WordPress Theme a few months ago most images are available in high resolution. Open them in a new tab for the hires version.
Last week I got the Rustico Field Notebook I ‘ordered’ from Massdrop in July.
When I saw the notebook I couldn’t resist – the Rustico notebooks, which are made in Utah, are just beautiful. I decided to get the buckskin version. I assume it will darken after a while – a few years ago I bought a briefcase from Wolf Leder, which got much darker / more yellow over the years.
I paid $28.80 (~£18.50; €25.30), which included two packs with three Field Notes each. I think I should have only gotten one pack of three Field Notes …and am trying to sort this out for nine days now. Despite having had several emails sent backwards and forwards I still don’t know if I should send the additional Field Notes back and where to. You can see that communication with Massdrop isn’t great, but the prices are fantastic – especially if you are from outside the USA. I didn’t have to pay customs / fees on any of my orders so far.
This wasn’t the first item I got from Massdrop [1]The Pebble watch shown in on of the previous blog posts was from them, too, and was just a bit more than half the UK price. – and I’m sure it won’t be the last. The only disadvantage is that you usually have to wait quite a while before you get your items – in this case it took four weeks.
Update: Massdrop has told me that I should have only received one pack of three Field Notes and that I should send the other one back.
Price: July 2015
Exchange rates: August 2015
I’d like to thank Michael (from Koralatov.com – currently offline) for the California Field Notes shown in these pictures. He sent them three years ago and I still haven’t used them up – but I certainly enjoy using them regularly.
The Massdrop link contains a friend invitation code.
To customise your notebook you basically create a file containing what should be printed on the cover (front, side and back) and Book Block will then print this on the cover of the notebook for you.
The whole idea sounds very tempting to me, especially since for what it is the price for one of the notebooks seems very reasonable – or should I say almost ridiculously modest.
Remember Monsieur Notebooks, from a previous blog post? It looks as if the notebooks will be done in cooperation with them. Back in 2011 when I reviewed the Monsieur Notebook they were made in India, but according to the Book Block Kickstarter page they are now manufacturing in the UK and you can chose from five different types of paper provided by Monsieur Notebooks. The covers used for the notebooks are from Europe, too, they are sourced from the Netherlands.
The whole Kickstarter sounds really exciting. I hope Book Block will get enough funding.
Book Block have offered many blogs, including Bleistift, a free notebook if their Kickstarter is successful. I don’t believe this has influenced me when writing this blog post. I have written about other Kickstarter projects in the past, some were successful, some were unsuccessful, and I have not received any good or money from the other Kickstarter projects I wrote about in the past.
I’m not a big fan of spiral bound notebooks or notepads. Spiral binding will usually put me off buying a notepad, but in the case of the spiral bound, Chinese made nu: tough paper I couldn’t resist.
I saw this notebook in the supermarket run by my employer’s /my university’s students’ union and the words “paper made from stone” managed to grab my interest at first sight.
Material
The paper is made from 80% ground limestone / chalk and 20% HDPE (many plastic bottles are made from HDPE) and promises to be water-proof, wipeable, tough, durable and, to my surprise, recyclable and biodegradable [1]I don’t know much about plastic, so I would very much appreciate if someone could explain biodegradable in the context of HDPE. A quick look on the Internet seems to suggest that you can make … Continue reading
In case you wonder, the Kaweco was filled with non erasable ink from Diamine.
How does the paper behave?
..with pencils
Compared to normal paper the pencil line left on this ‘stone paper’ feels much darker . The line also feels wider. Applying less pressure when writing will also produce a fairly dark line, more so than writing with less pressure on normal paper. I suspect this behaviour is caused by a rougher paper surface. You can certainly feel more friction when moving a finger across the ‘stone paper’, compared to normal paper.
How does the ‘stone paper’ compare to similar products? The lines left on this paper are also darker than those a pencil would leave on paper from a Rite in the Rain notepad. Altogether, this paper produces an unusual, but pleasant pencil writing experience.
Left: Rite in the Rain, Right: nu: Tough Paper
..with fountain pens
Let’s stick to the similar Rite in the Rain notepad for a moment. It’s pretty useless when you want to use it with a fountain pen. The ink just stays on the surface of the paper, it might even form tiny droplets …until it eventually dries. Because the ink didn’t really penetrate the top layer of the paper the colour of the writing is usually quite light. The behaviour of fountain pens and ink on nu:’s tough paper is quite different. The written text even looks very similar to text written on a normal piece of paper, with two differences:
there is an absence of visible texture on the ‘stone paper’, in my opinion this does influence the look of ink more than the look of graphite
the moment your fountain pen is a wet writer, even if only to a very small degree, the ink will take a really long time to dry.
On the above image you can see text written by a Kaweco Sport with an EF nib. The cartridge was empty and the pen was therefore an extremely dry writer. Drying took a few seconds. The lines made by the Pentel Tradio on the other hand, not a wet writer when I compare it to some of my other fountain pens, took just under 10 minutes to dry. On normal paper the Tradio‘s lines only take a few seconds to dry.
Left: Rite in the Rain, Right: nu: Tough Paper
How strong it the paper?
The paper seems to cope better with ‘bad conditions’, like wetness and physical impact. When trying the tear it nu:’s tough paper does behave rather unusual. Unlike the Rite in the Rain paper, which provides a similar ripping experience to traditional paper, ripping the tough paper feels a bit like ripping thin sheets of plastic. This is probably cause by the HDPE content. Normal paper usually rips in such a way that a sheet of paper lying horizontally will not be separated by a clear vertical line. Where the traditional paper is separated one half of the torn paper might contain more of the top layer of the paper, while the other half of the paper might contain more of the bottom layer of the torn paper. The tough paper however seems to stretch a bit where you tear, then separate clearly, while the stretched part curls slightly. It feels rather plasticy.
Left: Rite in the Rain, Right: nu: Tough Paper
Conclusion
Altogether a nice notepad. It’s an interesting novelty and I’m sure I’ll enjoy using it, but I’m not sure I’ll buy more once the novelty effect has worn off.
I paid £2.50 for this notepad. It’s spiral bound, has a tough cover and back, and has 160 sheets of paper.
I don’t know much about plastic, so I would very much appreciate if someone could explain biodegradable in the context of HDPE. A quick look on the Internet seems to suggest that you can make HDPE biodegradable by changing the recipe slightly. On a different note: biodegradable plastic reminds me of Dave’s biodegradable pencil test.
